AS the Covid storm abates we gather for the return of doves bearing olive branches indicating dry land. Is momentum building in the downward trajectory of the daily numbers? Have the vaccines begun to break the link between infection and death? When can we safely travel once more? Will they stick up the price of Bacardi and coke?

Everywhere, the talk is of normality. Will it be ‘old’ normal or new normal? What will it look like? Perhaps they’ll issue a good vibrations guide to tell us what we should be feeling. In that way we can measure our personal progress and make early interventions.

Those of us still standing with homes and jobs intact will resume our plans once more and embellish our lockdown stories for future retelling. We will talk of lessons learned; of stripped back living and being reacquainted with ‘old’ values. Politicians will weep as they tell us that by coming together we made the world a better place.

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These rivers of counterfeit kindness are in full spate in this Scottish election. Everyone is pledging. The next parliament must be a Recovery Parliament, says Anas Sarwar. What was it before it got hospitalised: an alive-and-kicking parliament?

Tell that to the 250,000 children who’ve been living in poverty for the 21 years of its existence and the families of the 1200 people who died of drugs misuse – the highest recorded rate in Europe. He’s pledged loans to ease fuel poverty secure in the knowledge he’ll never be troubled to deliver them.

Nicola Sturgeon is pledging “to increase NHS activity to pre-pandemic levels”. What is “NHS activity”? Is it more doctors and nurses; more hospitals; reduced health inequality? Can it be measured? Perhaps it’ll be made clear in the election manifesto. And why do we get manifestos in the middle of elections and not at the beginning?

The Greens don’t actually care what anything looks like, just so long as it comes with the guarantee of bivouacs and cycle paths. They’ve pledged to “work with the SNP” which means that they’ll get to score a few more carbon reduction schemes in the budget. The Tories simply accuse the SNP of being obsessed with independence and then become obsessed with the SNP being obsessed about independence.

For millions of Scots the pandemic is just another pathogen that must be dealt with as best they can. After 21 years of liberal, left-of-centre government in Scotland they’re still dealing with health and educational inequality; low life expectancy and massive levels of child poverty.

Whatever arbitrary factors we choose to indicate ‘normality’ will have to be explained to them: in these places people have been waiting for normality for the last 100 years. Even in the sunniest models of post-pandemic recovery plans the gap separating their ‘normal’ and ours is expected to grow wider still.

The first people to experience what the new normal looks and feels like will be Scotland’s school pupils when they return to their classrooms after the Easter break. We already know how the pandemic has begun to affect the most disadvantaged of them. Thus far though, their plight hasn’t yet reached the semi-literate posturing of our dismal political classes in their electioneering. And yet, the research is readily available.

The Sutton Trust, which seeks to improve social mobility and address educational disadvantage, issued a report last April which warned that post-pandemic normality will be an alien concept for our poorest children. It’s not as if we don’t know what’s coming.

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“There is a considerable risk that the crisis will further open up the early years’ attainment gap in both the short and the long term,” says the report. “The closure of schools is likely to have a considerable impact for all pupils, but the largest impact is likely to fall on those from the poorest families.”

It warns that education’s postcode lottery, where private tutors meet the cost of their new patios by touring our Chardonnay estates, will widen an already gargantuan attainment gap. Online learning is great if all pupils have access to its electronic tools. Many don’t.

Our poorest pupils will also bear most of the mental and psychological scars of lockdown. Their chances of enjoying a ‘normal’ life, already reduced, just became more unattainable. They and their families have been left marooned by the pandemic. The task of reaching them will require astute and careful management and a lifelong commitment to their educational welfare.

Unfortunately, in Scotland, it’s their collective misfortune to be governed by the identity-obsessed pantomime which masquerades as the SNP. This party’s efforts to effect a phased transition back to school have been utterly shambolic. This was epitomised last week by Nicola Sturgeon telling Scotland’s teachers that there must be no exams this year. So, after a year of planning to avoid last year’s results fiasco, this is what they’ve come up with: just scrap them; that’ll shut everyone up.

I’m in possession of one local authority’s dense and carefully drafted Framework for Implementation of the Alternative Certification Model. It seeks to validate the work of teachers in managing their pupils through lockdown so that, in future, their life chances won’t be permanently disfigured by it. Scotland’s First Minister has just trashed it, while nimbly avoiding any responsibility in the event of problems. Head teachers are now trying desperately to create a camouflage of lexical contortions to avoid using the forbidden word ‘exam’.

Her decision to bring back S1- S3 pupils for three weeks before the Easter break wrecked the programme of remote learning that schools had carefully constructed and which were beginning to bear fruit.

In Scotland an intricate nexus of agencies and authorities have tried to work in unison during the pandemic to mitigate its long-term effects on our pupils: the Education Recovery Group; the teaching unions; School Leaders Scotland; the head teachers association and the parent bodies. On this crucial decision they were all cast aside on the whim of a politician now exhibiting dictatorial tendencies.

A combination of Alex Salmond’s giant ego; Brexit and Boris Johnson’s Mafiosi cabinet now all act as deflector shields for a political leader with no actual politics of her own.

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